AMD might have a bit of trouble due to the basic nature of its contract with Globalfoundries. AMD and Globalfoundries have a “take or pay” arrangement, which requires AMD to buy a flat amount of wafers from its spinoff.

This year AMD needs to buy $1.15 billion worth of wafers, reports Barrons. The trouble is that AMD hasn’t been buying enough. In the first three quarters of the year AMD bought $746 million worth of wavers and the numbers are going down. It bought $269 million in Q1 and just $222 million in Q3. Even if AMD gets $250 million this quarter, it will still end up $150 million short, or it could order heaps of 32nm chips and sell them at a discount. One way or another AMD is bound to take a hit.

Since GloFo doesn’t produce AMD GPUs, the launch of Volcanic Islands products won’t make any difference. What about console custom APUs? Tough luck, the chips inside the PS4 and Xbox One are built by TSMC, too. In theory, it’s possible that GloFo will start making console chips at a later date, but not this year and probably not next year, either.

AMD’s x86 market share is going up, but that’s only thanks to console parts. Sales of its PC chips are actually going down – and that’s what matter for the GloFo deal. What’s more, AMD ditched its plans to build the first 28nm GloFo APUs last year, Kabini and Temash are built at TSMC.

So what about Kaveri, Beema and Mullins? It is still unclear, the rumour mill points to TSMC being tapped for Kaveri (bulk, not SOI), but we are still not sure about Puma-based low-end APUs. Basically there is a very good chance that all AMD 28nm parts next year will be produced by TSMC.

AMD’s Jaguar based APUs have been the talk of the town for quite a while. Although they will end up in a wide range of products, from microservers to tablets, the most publicised design win was Sony’s and Microsoft’s decision to use custom Jaguar APUs in their new consoles.

Needless to say, such high-profile design wins might do wonders for AMD’s new chips and the company is keen to talk them up.

"It is a very, very proud moment," AMD’s Saeid Moshkelani told Games Industry. "They are very complex projects, very complex designs, and it doesn't happen overnight. It has been a journey of over two years in development to get to today."

Moshkelani stressed that AMD will have no trouble meeting demand for the custom chips, which comes as no surprise. TSMC’s 28nm process is mature and AMD has been using it to build GPUs for years. Besides, Jaguar has a relatively small die, making it cheap to build and ensuring good yields.

"From a manufacturing perspective, in a year we ship tens of millions of units," he replied. "So we have a very strong manufacturing base for our APUs and discrete graphics. We leverage the same manufacturing infrastructure to develop for game consoles. So the volumes were not something that actually raised an eyebrow for us, because we're already in high-volume manufacturing."

Although AMD’s custom APUs are very impressive, being true PC geeks we’re still waiting for the first laptops and nettops based on the new chips. We strongly feel that Jaguar will be AMD’s most competitive product in 2013 and beyond.

AMD has set up a custom chip business unit in the hopes of getting more clients interested in tailor made chips.

AMD’s custom Jaguar-based APUs will power the new PlayStation and Xbox, and the custom chip push could result in more specialized hardware, for consumer electronics, highly specialized devices and mobile gear.

AMD VP and general manager Saeid Moshkelani said the new division will include a team of veteran chip architects, backed by AMD’s vast IP portfolio. Moshkelani also said that AMD could even make hybrid x86-ARM chips, if a client asks for them.

It is an interesting development and it could help AMD find its place under the sun in the midst of the PC slump. It is not hard to envision a multitude of possible custom chip applications, ranging from tablets and consoles, to servers and embedded parts.

However, whether AMD will manage to score plenty of orders for custom APUs remains to be seen. The potential is certainly there.